


nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, bucky writes shitty fanfic but it's hard to tell where it segues into that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 04:42:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1844740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It keeps him entertained for days- imagining Steve trying to punch Captain Spangle-pants in the face, maybe taking a step ladder with him to make sure he could get the height. The Adventures of Steve Rogers: Captain America’s Nemesis keep Bucky grinning as he slogs through mud to the command tent, slogs back through mud to round up his reluctant men and sets out in the dead of night to pray none of them get disintegrated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GloriaMundi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/gifts).



> For some reason I was hit with this idea, of Bucky making up stories about Steve, on a train this morning and basically banged it out because I thought it might entertain two dear friends who have been very good to me and are currently under stress organising an awesome fanfic thing.

"That fackin tart show’s got the _fackin_ nerve to be showing up ere. The fackin bald-faced NERVE, can't ardly believe it if me brain adn't prob'ly popped already. Fack me! The NERVE."

Bucky takes a moment to fondly process Smith's rambling. The British lad is terrifyingly young, shorter than any soldier surely should be and has some very strong opinions about the right way to fight a war. God knows, Bucky's gonna do his damnedest to get the kid sent home alive but he can't help but feel grateful that the person he so reminds him of is in Brooklyn. "The what now?"

"This fackin yank bloke in tights cavortin roun with GIRLS like they needter be out ere an all," Smith is looking at him like he's stupid so this must be something Bucky's missed.

"Why'd they be sending a fella in tights out here?"

"I knooooooow!" Smith wails, rubbing a smudge of gunpowder across his already heavily smeared, snub nose. Bucky is as, if not more confused than before. "Anyhoo, I reckon if I can get enough of us tersign a petition we could get some whiskey instead, you want in Sarge?"

Bucky spends about half a second contemplating whether he was going to sign the proferred, grubby, inside-out rations-box with a line of variously neat signatures and rough marks. It wouldn't do any good but fucking hell, he'd probably just about manage to kill another hundred or so Nazis for a drink.  
Smith bobs away.

Later, he finds out who the fella in the tights is and nearly laughs at how _offended_ Steve would be by this. Dancing girls, for chrissakes- they need warm socks, not nylons. Mind, Bucky ain’t opposed to a few nice-looking dames over another night getting his hair trimmed by guns that shouldn’t exist. He takes the poster down- he knows it’s winding the guys up and he’s an officer, it’s his job to keep ‘em vaguely happy.

He finds it tucked in his jacket, while he’s bunking down and it might be the light or because settling in on rough blankets always makes him think of couch cushions and Steve but he’s suddenly struck by how familiar the tights-fella looks. Oh god, Steve would be triply offended by this- the guy’s practically got his face, under the greasepaint.

He shuffles down in his bunk, warm for the first time in what feels like weeks, from suppressing laughter as he imagines Steve huffing, hunching his skinny shoulders and railing against the unfairness of this Captain America obscenity being such a macho mockery of him.

It keeps him entertained for days- imagining Steve trying to punch Captain Spangle-pants in the face, maybe taking a step ladder with him to make sure he could get the height. The Adventures of Steve Rogers: Captain America’s Nemesis keep Bucky grinning as he slogs through mud to the command tent, slogs back through mud to round up his reluctant men and sets out in the dead of night to pray none of them get disintegrated.

Steve always wanted to fight the good fight- hard to imagine a better target than this grinning mook, with his glassy, unsincere imitation of Steve’s eyes. Bucky spends long hours surveilling empty, fire-scarred fields and composing the scenes in the back of his mind.

> _Steve, our hero, scrappy street fightin’ man of Brooklyn, has spotted his target. The sunlight glints off Captain Sparkly’s friggin’ ridiculous shiny stars, he ain’t hard to spot but surrounded by a cluster of dancing girls, all shapely like, how is Steve going to punch this fucker square in the nose?_
> 
> _Our hero’s not smart but he knows street-brawlin - he got taught by none other’n Bucky Barnes. He’s gonna get this jumped-up idiot something good. Steve Rogers is a shadow of a man- a crowd’s no problem for him, he could squeeze between dancing girls faster’n nylons, a master of stealth so long as he’s taken his fucking asthma medication, which he would have cus this is important._
> 
> _Steve’s gonna punch Captain America in his big dumb mouth- he’ll boost himself on a girl’s stiletto, kiss her on the cheek, sock the guy so hard he falls over, just like Bucky taught him. The girls’ll grab him and carry him over the crowd, America’s real champion and the goon in the tights just lies there, dumbfounded._

Steve’s the only Captain America anyone needs. Anyone fighting for spangly-pants, not to keep Steve safe can fuck off.

\-----

The soldier isn't given paper unless it's for a specific purpose. None of the pouches and slots on his combat suit are for a pen. He does not dream in his sleep and he knows it would be tactically unsound to allow his mind to wander on any missions.

But sometimes he thinks of things, to control pain, to steady his hand on a rifle after a knife's gone through it, to clear his mind in preparation for cryo.

He isn't sure exactly what the things are. They're narratives, like a mission report but without a mission. He must have been given them to help him, they don't leave anything that wouldn't and they are useful.

> _A tall boy makes a bed, badly. But he's pleased by the chaotic blankets and sheets and ratty pillows, they're warm and fit-for-purpose. It's good for his mission, which is to fetch a smaller boy from a chair, carrying him carefully. He puts the small boy in the bed and wraps blankets around him, wraps himself around him. The small boy is warm, he is successful._

The soldier breathes out. The technician working on his left arm makes something spark and a jolt shoots up into his collarbone. Another exercise.

> _An artist is drawing, sitting at a table. He is frail, like a bird but he is drawing a stronger man, a soldier. He is waiting for someone to get home but too absorbed to notice that they have- he needs protecting, he is tactically very poor. The person who has arrived is the man from his picture, they have completed training and will be able to care for the artist. The artist will not need to train and will be safe. The mission is a success._

He is pleased that they gave him these stories. They are very helpful and he prefers them to the pain of the electro-shock device, which can leave him groggy before missions.

\------

The soldier is very scared. He knows he is not supposed to be scared. Not supposed to be able. He's damaged, though, badly and he fell from something and he doesn't want to go back, for some reason but he also knows he mustn't die. He's not supposed to die. He's supposed to get to the extraction point. He's not supposed to fall off things.

He should use the technique, the one they must have taught him for this. He needs to get up- he's assessed that his right leg is broken, in the lower tibia but he should be able to crawl to an extraction point, if he can get control. But none of the routines are right, they are about settling down and he needs to get up. He's bleeding. He's very scared.  
He closes his eyes, which he’s not supposed to do but he needs to think. He needs to try to find one of the routines that will help him now, there must be something. They give him the tools he needs.

> _A man is bleeding and very scared. He can't get up. It is cold and he has been there too long. Much longer than he was supposed to. He was never supposed to be there. He doesn’t know if he can get up, he is afraid he is going to fail his mission objectives or compromise information. He was given bad intel. He repeats numbers that are him and it doesn’t help._
> 
> _A huge man, in blue and red, comes to help and he lets him get up. The objective of the huge man is to get the bleeding man to an extraction point and the bleeding man is able to stand and walk, over fire, with the huge man helping. They have tactical trust in each other and it means they can be more effective. They get each other out, they don’t leave each other. The huge man’s mission is to find the bleeding man and the bleeding man’s mission is to protect the huge man. They are both successful._

The soldier arrives at the extraction point. He sets his leg while he is waiting, to make up for falling.

\-----

He’s given lots of paper and pens. They clearly don’t know that there are ways to kill people with wax crayons. He doesn’t really know what to do with it, except that it’s supposedly meant to help so he might as well try.

He eyes the paper for two days, from the settee of Steve’s apartment to the coffee table where it’s sitting. Assesses it like a mark. What would make the paper tick? What are the paper’s habits? He thinks about paper he’s seen before and how it was used. It will burn but he’s confident that starting fires indoors is frowned on since they invented central heating and he doesn’twant to go up to the roof.

In the end, he thinks about his file- Steve had given it to him, said he had more right to it than anyone. Steve also gave him the pens and paper. He decides maybe Steve would like a a file in return. He is used to giving people information.

Two more days later Natalia comes into the kitchen, laughing, “Did you write these, Yasha?”

She’s got his paper. His paper for Steve. Which he’s annoyed about because she didn’t have clearance for that. So he withholds an answer, which she ignores.

“Oh, you can’t show these to Steve- he’ll explode,” –that sounds extremely unlikely, despite Steve’s enhanced physique. He’d eaten some of the crayons to check that they were non-toxic and he had no trouble metabolising them or the paper.

“Why?” He was making toast and she is annoying him so he makes his voice harsh and turns away from her.

“ _Yasha_ , you are very sweet.” He knows she is smiling at him. She doesn’t tread on eggshells with him, touches him a lot, comes to talk to him more days than she doesn’t and he’s not sure what she wants from him. He doesn’t think she has a key to Steve’s apartment and he is concerned about Steve’s reluctance to think about stronger security measures against her entry.

“That isn’t the majority view,” he’s been assessed, formally or casually, by most of Steve’s friends. They think he’s dangerous and unstable and in one instance, ‘hot as fuck.’ He knows because Steve tells him what they say, says he doesn’t want him not knowing what the dynamics of his environment are. He thinks Steve’s friends are mostly tactically sound allies and the majority of their assessments seem pretty sensible, although he can’t really assess his own hot or fuckness. Right now, however, he is grumpy and increasingly embarassed, “They’re not meant for you to read. You don’t have-“ he breathes through his nose for a second, ‘clearance’ is the wrong word, “you don’t have the right to read them.”

She looks sad for him, which he thinks is her form of ‘apologetic’, “I’m sorry, James. They were on the table, I didn’t realise they were private.”

Privacy is something he knows she understands. She was quite firm that he should have it, even at the point when he could barely wash himself, too weak from the infection that had festered in his shoulder. “You’re not meant to even be in here. This is Steve’s flat.”

He likes her being there- doesn’t actually want to kick her out but she’s really upset him; he doesn’t have very much to have specific domain over, that was partly why they gave him the paper. He’s got more than he’s had for decades- he’s making himself toast and he was going to put Vegemite on it because Steve hates the smell but he’s away. He knows how to respect other people while keeping his own stuff his own. Natalia should, too.

“I’ll leave- you. You should keep hold of these, James. Don’t give them to Steve yet- he doesn’t read cyrillic well, he’d give himself a migraine trying but you should make him a version in English, when you want to,” she is smiling again, like she’s pleased for him. He finds her extremely weird sometimes but he thinks everyone does. And everyone is pretty weird.

“Ok,” he pauses because he doesn’t actually want to be on his own now, even though she’s the one who upset him. She’s probably here because she knows he’ll be missing Steve and he knows she sometimes sits on the fire escape to keep an eye on him even when she doesn’t come in, “You don’t have to go. Do you want…” he gestures vaguely at the toast, which seems a ridiculous thing to offer her and she just laughs at him and finds the vodka in the freezer.

He takes the paper back from her, as they settle into the couch and he gently tucks it into the arm. She’s right, he can’t bear the idea of Steve trying to puzzle it out like it’s code- he’s smart but he’ll be tired when he gets in and anyway, he’s not sure he actually wants him to see it now. It’s not Natalia, she annoyed him enough to show it to Steve out of sheer oppositional urge but it does need more drafting and to not be in fucking green crayon- he’s more than this.

> _Subject was born weak and sickly and stubborn-as-fuck. Showed no self-preservation tendencies, despite vulnerability. Subject is a punk disaster._
> 
> _Incident one: subject, aged six, hollers “You oughta learn to respect ladies!” at carfull of mobsters for splashing Mrs O’Malley. Subject only avoids being beaten into a pulp because Bucky shoves him into a bread shop and spends twenty minutes hiding under empty flour sacks with him until their mothers think they're fucking ghosts._
> 
> _Incident two: subject, aged fourteen, picks a fight with three people twice his size for endorsing slavery. Subject gets more black eyes than he has eyes and can thank his punk ass that Bucky happens to have a mean as fuck left hook._
> 
> _Incident three: subject, aged 23, kisses Bucky in the middle of Coney Island alley. Homosexuality is illegal. Subject only avoids criminalisation because he looks like a fucking girl with that hair._
> 
> _Incident four: subject, aged 27, volunteers to have some dumb-assed science injected into his body so he can go and get himself and Bucky killed in a war. Subject owes Bucky at least several back rubs over this one, which has caused him considerable anguish over the the last century. Subject can stop trying to hug him until he’s worked out where still does a good lasagne and brought a fucking kilo back for dinner._
> 
> _Subject has the bluest eyes humanity has ever produced, possible reason for continued survival against all statistically meaningful likelihood._

\-----

Bucky gets himself a StarkPad- two StarkPads, in fact. He likes the big one for reading comics on the couch and the smaller one for playing Angry Birds: Christmas Edition in bed and he’s always liked having smart stuff. He makes some cases to match the metallic strafing on his left arm, so Steve will stop pretending to think they’re his just because he forgets to ever fucking plug in a charger.

He’s less bothered about laptops or computer terminals, doesn’t really have that much to type that’s longer than a tweet but he and Steve both like slobbing around, contorted over the couch and half-watching Game of Thrones while browsing the internet. Bucky’s quite into the chaotic stream of shit that is Tumblr- it seems like as good a way as any to catch up on a century and a good half of it seems to be pornography, so that’s a good development.

But he does like writing, occasionally, when he gets the slim bluetooth keyboard out. He’d make some sort of shitty justification about how it helps with his memories to think about narrative formats but he’s well past lying to himself about anything in his own brain that’s not actively destructive. He just fucking likes it, every now and then. When Steve’s away, mostly and he knows it’s when he gets a bit lonely, wants a bit of time to himself to miss Steve without any of the others worrying about him being sad. He’s allowed to be sad- the guy ditched on him for most of a century, he kind of likes having him and his dumb, pert ass around.

> _Times Square is alight, with neon and bulbs and fuck-knows-what crap they use these days- it’s half past one in the morning and it might as well be midday, the sort of shitty/shiny effect that’s either pathetically saddening or a glorious blaze, depending on your mood. Long, dark hair is threaded through enormous fingers, pulling hot mouth to hot mouth as Steve Rogers drags Bucky Barnes into another stupid idea._

So Bucky kind of writes stories about him and Steve. He’s not sure if Steve knows- for all he tries to keep huge-‘n’-blonde off his StarkPad so he can actually use the damn thing, it’s not locked and he doesn’t think he’d care, he knows Steve has fantasies about them left over from the long time without each other. Bucky had his fuckin’ dick in Steve’s ass two nights back while Captain-goddamn-America let rip with such obscene dirty talk even the patented Barnes filth-cool got pretty bothered. Is it really ok to just say you want someone to stick their hand in your butt these days? Even when they’ve already got some of their anatomy in there.

(Bucky has now been thinking about it for over 48 hours and Steve had better have fucking meant that, cus otherwise there’s gonna have to be a moratorium on teasing the shit out of him before going off to fuck-knows-where-dripoor and not even replying to naked Snapchats, which he knows damned well are precious and temporary works of art)

He might have, at some point, decided to find out if anyone else wrote things about Captain America doing butt stuff. Which was one of his more naiive, early google searches- fuckin’ obviously everyone thinks about Captain Handsome doing it with… well, pretty much everyone. The ones about Stark (either generation) got a laugh out of him- christ, Tony could not handle Steve- but he was both pleasantly surprised and freaked out to all hell that there was a large contingent of people writing about Captain Sparklyass and Sergeant Shiny Killer Arm doing things that made Steve’s filthy mouth sound like a polite chat in a convent.

> _“The war’s over! The WAR’S OVER!” a street-seller is shouting, handing out newspapers at a speed that suggests they’ve got extra arms._
> 
> _“Which one, shithead?” bellows a scrappy-looking teen with an asymmetrical haircut and a fashion sense even worse than Steve’s._
> 
> _“Doesn’t fuckin’ matter son, one down is a win,” murmurs Steve, although it’s more into Bucky’s ear than anything. He’s wrapped his arms over one metal, one flesh shoulder and his mouth is down by Bucky’s neck, their heights too close to rest chin-on-head. His breath is hot against the cool air and nothing’s felt this content and close without a recent orgasm for a long time._

Not that his stuff was like that, so it was useful to know he had a ready-generated and highly personal wank bank of more text than he could read over the next seventy years if he ever needed it. And there had been that really hot one about Steve and Clint that had left him barely able to look either of them in the face for a week after, until Romanoff somehow started quoting it at inappropriate moments and Bucky had to pull himself together to exact revenge.

(There are now two very, very explicit fics about the precise and marvellous and totally non-sexual pleasures that the Black Widow gets from cross-stitch with some extremely exact details about her preferences for Aida, thread and relevant magazine subscriptions)

What he writes (which he doesn’t feel any need to add to the internet’s already vast collection) is moments that haven’t quite happened (which he supposes is the difference between his and the other stuff, which is mostly moments that have _absolutely_ not happened, what the fuck even is a High School AU) –he knows there’ll be more that they do get, he’s not grieving for chances missed. It’s just that things were different back when they were… not frozen and there were some things he likes to daydream about. He can do that, now- think whimsy shit without it being a problem, amble around his own mind without losing reality.

> _Steve wraps his big, dumb arms around Bucky and holds him in place, like a 200lb harness. The huge lunk thinks he’s protecting him, just because Bucky is almost smaller than him, now but realistically, Bucky’s just trying to stop Captain America getting killed romantically strolling into traffic._
> 
> _Bucky’s gonna kiss him, cus this gigantic, patriotic idiot has a mouth like heroin and Steve’s gonna make cute noises until they have to call a cab before someone spots the Winter Boner in the middle of New York. This fucking idiot’s been the death of them both,_

\----

“Bucky,” Steve is soft and insistent at his shoulder, shaking him awake, “Buck- wake up. I’m back, you’ve fallen asleep on the couch again.”

Bucky blinks, wipes drool off his face and rights himself slightly too fast, knocking his StarkPad off the couch. “Whu- ‘llo,” he articulates.

Steve picks up the tablet from the floor, glancing at it where it’s lit up from bouncing off Bucky’s foot. “Buck, did you fall asleep writing fanfiction?”

“Err.” And he _means_ to say ‘well, Mr Filthier-than-thou, where the hell was my butt-shot of you jumping out of a plane or something to keep me warm’ but Steve looks affectionate- moreso even than usual, “I kind of love you.”


End file.
